![]() ![]() One of my students came to me puzzled by an article I had suggested she read: What is a "nonnative" language? she asked. You might have mentioned American usage which seems often to join without a hyphen. Of all of your examples, none have had the hyphen in printed American English for a long time. It looks as if British English is matching American English here. Surely we can't do away with the hyphen in bramble-covered fence rail or five-year-old boy? What about the use of hyphens in compound adjectives. How far does this go though? The shop at our local university is currently advertising a sale on its 'stationary'! Surely if that's how the word is being used, the dictionary should say so! Perhaps the OED should install themselves as bastions of good English, rather than changing the language because its users don't know any better. If we aren't using hyphens then I guess the dictionary should reflect that. The OED does only reflect the usage of the language. And let's not forget London Transport's lamentably unhyphenated promise to provide 'More late night buses'! at a leading magazine publisher.) It's nice that the OED is catching up with usage (was anyone really writing 'chick-pea'?) but note that in compounds, two-worders will still need a hyphen: pot-bellied pig, ice-cream cone, test-tube baby. what were you thinking?!Įxcepting 'logjam', all your 'now one word' examples have already been so for years in my dictionary. I'm incensed that the word ice cream is two words and that crybaby is one. Perhaps nowadays authors often miss out the second step in this evolutionary process of word creation. Then, when they have become common-place, the hyphens are dropped. As the phrases becomes more widely-used, authors start to hyphenate them. New compound phrases are always being created, first as separate words. English spelling and grammar are not rigid - they are simply guidelines for mutual understanding. Writing that conveys the author's meaning clearly, quickly and accurately is more effective than writing that does not. The whole point of writing is to convey meaning to others. ![]() If one has a spellchecker in constant back-ground use, it will not recognise these portmanteau words, and will underline them as you go. It is much more userfriendly to insert a hyphen - or as purists might say, a dash - to highlight the break-up of a sentence into clauses. When reading off a screen, it is difficult to see these punctuation marks. The hyphen has been re-invented as a substitute for punctuation - the colon, semi-colon and even brackets have all but disappeared. The rot set in when people stopped writing to-day and to-morrow. As the house-style guide of Oxford University Press used to say, "If you take hyphens seriously, you will surely go mad." Indeed, it is a mistake to make a fuss about punctuation unless clarity or actual meaning is at stake. ![]() One knows through common sense that a walking stick, which used to be walking-stick, is a stick for walking (a verbal noun + a noun) rather than a stick that walks (a participial adj. The use of a hyphen to yoke two nouns has declined because, quite simply, it usually isn't necessary. ![]() With the hyphen, Mr Stevenson notes: "It's starting to look a lot like something your grandmother might write."Ī selection of your comments appears below. But to much of the rest of the world, it's email. The likes of the BBC and the New York Times are fighting a valiant defence of the hyphen. One battleground is the word e-mail itself. There has to be a negotiated common ground but within that there's room for variation and a degree of creativity." "I tell my writing classes the hyphen is there to help the reader and to show either that two words are linked in some significant way or to add understanding in words like go-between and de-icing," she says. Chris Robinson, who edits for Scottish Language Dictionaries and gives classes in advanced writing at the University of Edinburgh, says she has bigger grammatical fish to fry, with undergraduates often needing an explanation as to the difference between a noun and a verb and where to place a full stop. ![]()
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